Build v. Buy: Business Intelligence Solutions v. SEO Platforms: Which is right for you?

There are significant challenges that come when cobbling together your own SEO reporting tool with a BI solution. Let’s take a look at the most common pitfalls and explore why you shouldn’t go at it alone.

As a marketer, have you ever found yourself considering whether or not to build your own in-house reporting platform?

Maybe a new manager comes in and wants to cut costs, so proposes assembling your own reporting system using a business intelligence solution. Or maybe your IT manager says, “We need to design and control our own reporting infrastructure. It won’t be secure otherwise.” Or perhaps you just hired a magical data scientist who will perform statistical regressions against your data and advocates having all integrated in your own cloud.

No matter the flavor of the conversation, all too often we hear about marketers shifting their focus away from their core marketing activities to development. When marketers focus their efforts on API stitching of different datasets, it pulls them away from connecting with their users, creating engaging campaigns, and driving strategic initiatives. Before they know it, marketers can find themselves at the mercy of IT to fix, upgrade, and debug issues in their homegrown reporting infrastructure.

Our platform gives your team the freedom to do what they do best— connect with your customers and future customers.

There are significant challenges that come when cobbling together your own SEO reporting tool with a BI solution. Let’s take a look at the most common pitfalls and explore why you shouldn’t go at it alone.

1. High Costs Associated with Business Intelligence Solutions

Every team wants to reduce costs, and often teams believe building in-house by stitching together multiple data sources for SEO is a cheaper solution than buying an existing platform. However, that’s often not the case. In fact, the costs associated with an in-house solution can rack up quickly.

First, there’s the cost of the BI technology itself. You have to consider the initial implementation cost plus the annual subscription. Then, you have to take into account the possibility of adding seats for additional users that will cost you.

Next, you have the costs of individual data providers like a SERP tool or an HTML scraper. Any additional dataset will mean an additional fee.

Once you have all that data, you have to store it somewhere, right? That’s another expense to add to the list. And it’s starting to add up.

Finally, who’s implementing and building all of this? If you don’t have an in-house developer already, you’ll have to add headcount. If you do have a developer already, she’ll have to allocate some of her time to architecting and maintaining. And we can’t forget the cost of your time.

2. Factoring Time Invested in Business Intelligence Solutions

There is a very large human time cost to architecting and maintaining a BI solution with multiple data sources for SEO. Along the way there will be unforeseen bugs and issues that pull your team away from key projects— projects that have a higher revenue impact.

Rather than spending your limited calories on technology development, your team’s time is better used in the field, educating the organization on how to adopt SEO into their day-to-day workflows.

A platform like Conductor gives you that valuable time back. It takes the onus off your team to build and maintain reports. At the same time, Conductor facilitates team collaboration and empowers non-SEO team members to leverage search data in their everyday workflow.

For instance, our Role-Based Views give each team member a “view” with access to just the most relevant features for their areas of responsibility in Conductor.

By tailoring the platform to the best practices of each role, we’re making it easier for each team member to focus on the activities that drive performance. This enables cross-functional teams to work more efficiently and share insights in one platform— setting you up for long-term success.

3. Business Intelligence Solutions Require Maintenance & Innovation

Once you have your system up and running, it doesn’t stop there. Ongoing maintenance takes time and money, and there can be unforeseen bugs along the way like broken API connections. These issues distract your team from key marketing activities and bigger strategic initiatives.

And that’s just for current visualizations. What about creating new views? What about keeping up with new innovations in the space? After all, from algorithm updates to voice search, there’s no doubt SEO is evolving rapidly. Do you have the resources to keep your in-house solution from becoming obsolete?

When you invest in Conductor, you have a team ready to assist you 24 hours a day, and a team of engineers working behind the scenes to ensure you have the most cutting edge technology. At Conductor, we have the largest R&D team in the industry, and we’re not stopping there— We’re investing heavily in adding over 100 engineers this year.

That team doesn’t actually end with our in-house engineering talent; we also integrate with our partners like DragonMetrics, LinkResearchTools, and DeepCrawl, so you can rest assured you have top talent fueling further innovations for your business.

4. Considering Data in Business Intelligence Solutions

Finally, we have to talk about data. Data might not the sexiest of topics, but it’s the building block of any solution whether it be Conductor or your in-house BI solution.

When you stitch together multiple data sources, challenges arise. You have considerations like:

How much data do I need?

What is the cadence of collection?

How do I store it?

How long should I store it?

Reconciling multiple datasets is not easy. In one visualization alone, for example, you could be pulling in data from a keyword index, web analytics, Google Search Console, and an HTML scraper. Those four data sources all require distinct applications and different considerations to create the visualization.

Conductor seamlessly integrates multiple data sources. We turn data into insights. We do the heavy lifting of maintaining and reconciling the data, so you don’t have to. At the same time, we are constantly integrating with new data sources from our partners.

At Conductor, we believe in the power of working together. That’s why our partner ecosystem integrates data from sources like DeepCrawl, SEMrush, DragonMetrics, and more — for an experience that’s as deep as it is elegantly built.

Ultimately, the question becomes: are you a developer or a marketer? If you decide to stitch together SEO data sources with your business intelligence solution, you will likely spend more time maintaining and architecting reports than driving strategic initiatives.

Conductor’s enterprise platform takes the burden off your team and gives you the freedom to focus on higher revenue projects and driving SEO adoption across your org.

Lindsay is the Director of Product Marketing at Conductor. She is an experienced B2B marketing professional passionate about industry-changing technologies. Lindsay is the author of Content Engine: A Growth Hacker’s Guide to Content Marketing. She is also a regular speaker at industry events including Disruptive Technologists, Digital Summit DC, and Inside Intercom.